Cargo (The Ascendants Book 1)

by V. M. Law

  “Nigel. I am so sorry.” He had time to think about this reunion, about one hundred and thirty four years, and now, as the product of his intelligence, a son of sorts, aimed a laser cannon at him and enacted a brutal plan of revenge, he lamented internally his inability come up with anything better to say. He felt hollow, like a cornhusk rotting in soil.

  “You aren’t sorry. You only regret that your plan didn’t work. The great Colonel Lee, failed scientist and military advisor who is now failing in his opus, his greatest, elaborate achievement, and the only thing you care about is the fact that you overlooked one small factor. You never thought you’d see me again.”

  “I knew I would see you. I have been waiting.” He put his hands over his head, clasping his fingers together and envisioning the layout of the keyboard behind him. A few keystrokes. He needed a little bit more time. “I knew that Patsy and you fell in love, and I knew that you would destroy the base in anger if you lost her, so I took her from you. You are a computer. You don’t know love, you don’t know forgiveness, you don’t know empathy. You know only what I told you and you act on your incomplete emotions like a child having a tantrum.”

  He walked a tightrope and he knew it, just as he knew that the vindictiveness of Nigel would not allow it to kill him without a witness. As he continued speaking, deriding the computer for its semblance of understanding, he fidgeted with his hands. “You see, Nigel, you are blinded by rage. You don’t see the big picture because the only thing that occupies your mind is the exacting of revenge upon the man who slighted you. I am not proud of what I did. I regret it every single night of my life, because after I programmed a personality into you, I too began to love you like a son. I only did what I had to do because in the end, you are only a representation of a person. Not a person, but a shadow.”

  “Stop talking,” the computer screamed again.

  Brysen continued stretching his arms, extending his legs and affecting an air of nonchalance as he maneuvered the screen behind his back. So close. “You know it is true. Your love for Patsy—and hers for you—was only a ripple, a stone in the pond.”

  “Get away from that computer.”

  “But we are talking. You wanted to talk, no? You wouldn’t make an old man stand in your honor, would you? My old bones could hardly take it.” The final keystroke. Somewhere in the station—he could not hear, and did not know if his computer work had paid off—the Morrow should have started up. In a few minutes, an hour at the most, the ship would be ready for its programmed plunge into the Jump, where the intense pressure of the wormhole would set off the Charybdis and consequently block the two locations for the wormhole’s entrance and exit. He hoped.

  As the laser cannon built into Nigel’s chest began to glow with a more irradiating blue aura, the old man smiled and let the emotion of his exultation show across his rigid, careworn face, knowing that the computer would not recognize his delight, would not be able to comprehend the meaning behind his slackening features as they sagged beneath the weight of interminable years spent in the solitude of knowledge, the chasm of responsibility.

  The weight, as its ascended from his shoulders, allowed him a fresh breath, a deep heave of the chest that removed all the tension of his past life. If his plot failed now, it would be through the fault of chance alone, and he listened to the irate computer with this knowledge in the forefront of his mind.

  “Stand up or I shoot you where you sit.”

  “If you wish, Nigel. If you wish.” Resigned, Brysen Lee stood up, straightened his posture, walked out the door, uncaring of the pulsing sound of his captor’s weapon, trained at his back and primed for the immolation of carbon based matter.

  Chapter 30

  Llewellyn Mantiss limped along the hallway, watching it curve and bend and contort in his field of vision and knowing that he hallucinated the sickening architecture, that the floors did not swell with his heavy breathing and that at the farthest end of the hallway he hobbled through, the wall sat fixed in one location, unmoving, a solid object that did not shimmer or dance in the flickering lights of the station. He could feel every bead of sweat that marched down his cheekbones, but the holes in his leg seemed distant, and the pain they produced in his body with each step felt only like a small amount of pressure, like a blood pressure cuff.

  He continued fighting for distance, weighed down by the weight of Charybdis as well as the memory of Gustav walking into a hail of bullets, the sound of his blood hitting the ceiling when the detonation happened.

  Turning his head, swooning and almost tumbling headlong onto the metal floor grates below, he followed the black puddles of his blood drying in the baking intense heat of the hallways that went on forever.

  Or is that just me? he thought, wiping the sweat of exertion from his brow and continuing his death march. For reasons that seemed asinine to him, he knew he had to reach the end of the hallway, that the bag strapped to his hip belonged to someone, that he must return it. All of this came to him in flashes that inspired the steps he fought for, the staggering and the running of his hands along the railings on the side of the pedestrian causeway.

  When his vision began to fog, his only thought was for how close he had come to the wall at the end of the hallway, that his trek was almost over, that he covered the distance of an incommensurable desert faster than the Age of Discovery ever could, and he felt joy at knowing that it all sat on a precipice, ready to be decided.

  When he fell, collapsing under the weight of his strain, he had no way of knowing that the white light filling his vision and removing everything else from his mind was not the white light of death, but that of the hallway floros that sometimes flickered, sometimes held out. He knew only that he couldn’t die, that the white light of death taking him must be floros, and then he knew nothing at all, sucked into the web of unconsciousness where he had no more worries and could not feel the dreadful weight of the metal orb pulling him backward with the force of a black hole.

  ***

  “We can’t wait any longer, Kasey.”

  “We have to look for them.”

  “Gustav knows what he’s doing.” Ajax’s voice fell silent as he spoke the next words. “If he’s taking this long then he’s dead. I felt it, anyway.”

  “You felt it? You mean you’re going to give up over a feeling?”

  They stood in silence, unaffected by the carnage of the Ides that damaged and destroyed other sectors of the station. Kasey’s gun leaned against the wall next to her, and Ajax sat with his back to the same wall directly by her side. They said nothing, but only looked in the same direction—to their right, where Ajax said Gustav and Llewellyn would appear from if they succeeded in retrieving the Charybdis from the Age.

  Ajax made no reply to her barb, so she continued speaking. “If you think they’re dead, go down to the Catacombs and ride this out. It’s what you’ve been doing for your whole life.”

  “What would you know about it, girl?”

  She could tell his anger was increasing, and she continued to prod him, hoping to draw a rise, to draw him from the lull of failure he had fallen into after the old man revealed his fatal information.

  “I know that you’d rather try and survive on your own than stop the Ides, that you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself and that the death of humanity means about as much to you as where all the fuel rods you eject end up.”

  “Fuck you,” he sneered, not wanting to show any emotion.

  “I also know that you knew about the Ides coming here.”

  He stopped and looked at her, his eyes wide and his jaw hanging.

  “Brysen told me. He detected communications between the two ships in the planet’s orbit and you are the only one who has access to the SatCom links.”

  “Aren’t you a detective?” he said with the same snide grin and the same irritated kink in his voice, as if he spat his words out like rotten meat. “You hear something from a rattled drug addict and think it’s true, and then concoct your st
ories in your head, where they belong, but you have to share them.”

  “This isn’t a story, Ajax. You communicated our position.”

  Ajax sat with his limbs limply splayed and his gun still on the metal beside him. They languished together, too tired for the fire that the argument commanded. “You think you know everything, don’t you?”

  “I know you are communicating with the enemy. I know you sent Gustav and Llewellyn to their deaths and I know you expected me to stay with Brysen. The only thing I need to ask you myself is what you planned on doing in the Catacombs by yourself. Did you think you would fly the Morrow alone? Or was it something else?”

  ***

  Flashes of consciousness punctuated by the drum beat pulse of his blood thundering in his head. The pain had diminished beyond the point of discomfort and he felt like he floated, stationary and anchored, but an inch off the ground regardless, untouched by the cold steel that made up the floors and the ceilings and the walls that he still knew he must reach. Behind the wall everything would work itself out.

  He reached out his hand, grabbed a crack in the metal floor panels, and dragged his body forward. He felt a moment’s pain, and then the feeling that he floated an inch from the ground. When he felt that feeling of being disconnected from the solid surface below him, he leaned his head back and laughed at the joyous party of his life that spilled out of his abdomen and ran back to where his vision blurred. The white shimmering light of the floros in the ceiling could easily be mistaken for an entreaty of death, insidious and always working its way in.

  ***

  Kasey pulled her pistol on Ajax when the captain failed to produce a response that she felt adequately met the punishment she sought to give him for transgressing her trust and that of her great grandfather. “I was going to put one more drink in my belly before I get run through. There used to be a helluva bar in the basement of this place.” He laughed at his witticism as if he had already put several more drinks into his belly, and Kasey unsheathed her gun with a rapid motion, striking Ajax in the temple with its butt and sending the bear-like man sprawling to the floor in the hallway.

  He jumped to his feet faster than she thought possible, and stood in a fighter’s stance before her, shaking and wriggling his fingers as if they thirsted for the suppleness of her neck. “Got it all figured out, huh?” He swung his arms out at the last syllable, attempting to lock Kasey in a deadly embrace. She rolled beneath his grasp and struck him again, feeling consternated at the lack of effect her blows had on his head.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know who called, though?”

  “What?” she asked half-screaming as she dodged another swing from him. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the communication. Don’t you want to know who reached out to whom?

  “They couldn’t have known where we were. I think it speaks for itself who started the talking.”

  The two continued their dance and all the while did not notice the ringing of alarm bells or the sounds of war that grew steadily louder in the background of their fight. Ajax lunged and threw heavy hitting walloping fists in all directions. Kasey sidestepped and jabbed and refused to activate her gun until Ajax switched his strategy and swooped his leg out, tripping Kasey up and sending her falling to the floor.

  When Ajax went to fall on her, to tear the gun from her hands and her arms from her shoulders, he was met with the blue activation light and the whirring of the pistol producing enough energy to run a city, but containing it in a clod, a piece of sand, an empty shell.

  He stopped, sagged his shoulders and sighed. “It’s no use anyway, us fighting. Kill me if you must, but I won’t hurt you.”

  “I just want to know why. We could’ve won.”

  “We lost before you were born. It took Farrow for me to see that.”

  “Farrow?”

  “Farrow. She called. From the Ides’ ship.”

  ***

  One more.

  He threw his hand out into the blackness that encroached further. The pacing of his breath was all he had now, and it faded fast, keeping him in suspense every time he exhaled, wondering if he would have the strength to fill his lungs again.

  One more.

  He dragged his body—dead weight—and tried to push with his feet, though he couldn’t rightly feel them and operated only on the assumption that they were still there. He couldn’t spare the energy of looking back to verify for sure, but felt confident that his role was almost over and he would be resting soon enough. He hoped only that his final minute would allow him the luxury of a cigarette or a drink or even just Kasey, whom he had forgotten about and whom he figured must also be in bad shape, by now.

  One more. He threw his arm and dragged.

  One more.

  ***

  “She told me everything. The Ides, the computers, the Morrow and the Age, and MarsForm. She sang like a canary, as they used to say.” Kasey held the gun pointed at him, eyeing him down its sights and seeing only the red dot of her infrared aiming device against his forehead.

  “Brysen developed the technology that powered Patsy and he put it in two separate computers, one of which we’ve already met.”

  “Patsy?”

  “Yes. And you can guess where the other one was kept after MarsForm rescued them.”

  “Rescued?”

  “From here. They were the computers that ran all of this—” a sinister sweep of the hands around his head, “—until he took their personalities away. Their love. They went haywire, after they were transferred to the Morrow and the Age, one vowing to find the other, both ships being light-years away at best.”

  The realization dawned on her, the horror of it and its finality and the sudden actuality of its premises.

  “The computers were practically wiped clean, but kept running, Kasey. And one of them was kept running a little too well, because he found the wormhole and went through it. Signal Day? The Jump? All of it was fabricated and all of it by the computer. Nigel. Because he wants his Patsy back.”

  The sizzling sounds of Patsy’s circuits engulfed in the blue flame of her laser. The smell of burning rubber and plastic. It returned so vividly that Kasey felt the weight of her body shift back on her heels.

  “He came here to kill your great grandfather, Kasey. The whole thing. The Ascendency, the Commoner, the civil war and the invasion of the Ides were all so the computer could kill Brysen. So forgive me if I’m not keen on dying here after spending my waking and dreaming hours reliving…this.” Another sweep of his outstretched hands around the vaulted hallways.

  As the weight of the words fell on Kasey’s shoulders and dragged her into a pit of despair, a dinging bell sounded and the crisp quality of its call made both of them jump. The door was opening, its hissing and sputtering like fanfare for a welcome party.

  Chapter 31

  The door slid open and the hydraulics’ swoosh alerted him to the success of his mission. He had reached the end of the hall, and dragged his metal orb to where it belonged and waited now for the sensation of floating one inch off the ground to return to him, to lift his chin, which sagged, and lift his eyes, which felt heavy and hard to open. He still wondered if the light he stared at was the light of death or floros, but he also knew that because he made it to the end of the hallway, it did not matter.

  He was free to go.

  The feeling came back, the one of floating—

  A hard slap and he crashed back down and lifted his head and opened his eyes, which did not seem so heavy now.

  “Mantiss! Mantiss! Don’t leave me.”

  He knew that voice and he knew the face that hung before him, though they did not match and he could not remember the face. The voice was Kasey, and he knew he had died.

  ***

  “Don’t leave me now, Mantiss!” she kept screaming, but his face seemed too pale and his neck lolled about in awful, abhorrent arcs and his head always settled in the same crooked angle. His eyes were half op
en, but did not respond to light.

  “He’s still breathing,” Ajax said, trying not to seem concerned with the safety of the orb fastened to the dying body’s hip.

  “You hear that, Mantiss? You’re still breathing. You’re going to make it.”

  She slapped gently at the pallid cheeks in her hands and pushed the sweaty hair from the brow. She pushed her lips against his and breathed deeply into his chest, watching the sternum rise and fall with the expectoration of her spit and vapors.

  A few times, she thought he had awakened, had moved his head to signify to her that she had helped him just fine and that he would like to thank her for that, but every time she stopped aiding his breath his chest sat still and his eyes rolled back. Then he did open them, and he did actually cough up a big phlegm ball of blood and mucus that had pooled in the crux of his throat and he looked at Kasey, shocked at the amount of blood that still secreted from his mouth and his gunshot wounds. Kasey stared at him, surprised and unable to comprehend the reverse in his fate.

  “Kase,” he said, and then faded again, leaving Kasey to wonder if the limp body in her arms had actually moved at all. Ajax continued monitoring his pulse.

  “We need to get him on the elevator, Kasey.” His eyes continuously darted around, in both directions from whence they could be attacked if the Ides happened upon them.

  “He’ll die if we move him.”

  “He’s going to die if we don’t move him. He’s bleeding everywhere.”

  At the mention of blood everywhere, Llewellyn opened his eyes again, and turned his head toward Kasey, moving his lips and forcing air through his lips in a silent attempt at speech. Kasey calmed him, pet his cheeks and told him to stop his fretting, to quiet down and breathe deeply, but nothing she said to him stopped the twitching of his lips.